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golinux

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 3,604  

about:blank change after Chimaera update

Yes, I am still on Chimaera. Decided I would update after it went to old,old stable. My habit is to always open a new browser page to about:blank but now DDG has inserted it's icon in the address bar. I never search from the address bar and really don't want to have to look at that icon. I visited about:config which used to be useful but like everything else in the digital world, has mushroomed into an impenetrable complexity.

Note that chromium and palemoon still respects about:blank.

Is there any way I can get FF to go back to opening a blank page without that stupid DDG icon when it is told to do so?

Everybody should have such catastrophic problems . . . LOL!

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fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,780  

Re: about:blank change after Chimaera update

I don't know if this gets rid of the icon, but this will disable searching in the address bar. Or at least it will make it so that your mouse doesn't automatically bounce up to the address bar when you start typing. I haven't actually tried to see if searching in the address bar still works. And I don't have the ddg icon.

In case the search bar gets disabled by an update, here's how to get it back.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1356391

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.

More info on about:config: Configuration Editor for Firefox. The moderators would like us to remind you that changes made through this back door aren't fully supported and aren't guaranteed to continue working in the future. Since I use this one myself, I feel comfortable mentioning it, even if it does turn out to be temporary relief only.

(2) In the search box in the page, type or paste handoff and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar preference to switch the value from true to false

Edit: I tried it. "about:blank" gives me a blank page. In the address bar, it says something like "Search with ddg or enter a url" but there's no icon and the page is blank. It is still possible to search in the address bar but it doesn't jump there from the search bar.

Edit2: Sorry, I forgot I was in Chimaera when I did the test. In excalibur there's a duck icon in the address bar. I assume that can be changed by changing the default search engine, in case you like the bing or wikipedia icon better. Do what I do and don't look at the duck.

HardSun

Member

Registered: 2025-07-29

Posts: 43  

Re: about:blank change after Chimaera update

If you just want a blank page when you open firefox, try this. I got it from the arkenfox user.js i use in firefox.

1) go to about:config
2) copy paste this into the search browser.startup.homepage
3) double click that link and change whatever is there (usually its about:home) to chrome://browser/content/blanktab.html

I cant help with the duckduckgo icon thing sorry.
arkenfox user.js link if you are interested.
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/

Last edited by HardSun (Yesterday 23:37:14)